ICYMI: Five Noteworthy IoT Updates to Round Out the Week

Happy Friday, readers!

As part of our last ‘ICYMI’ IoT round-up (read here), we covered investments in farming automation (e.g. tracking tree health and achieving optimal crop yield in vineyards and orchards, saving time when breeding drought-resistant plant variations to cultivate more sustainably, purpose-built autonomous tractors, etc.), as well as ways to provide customers the ability to switch seamlessly between cellular and non-terrestrial network (NTN) connectivity; just one way to bypass legacy infrastructure constraints and make better strides in IoT.

For today’s ICYMI, the story round-up includes the following:

• Water Data IoT Team at Divirod Joins the SAS IoT Partner Ecosystem: SAS is laser-focused on a future made better via tech-driven insights and well-harnessed analytics (already working with big names like Microsoft, Intel (News - Alert), Cisco, HPE, Siemens, Deloitte, Lenovo, Semtech and plenty of others), which is why the latest partner joining the SAS IoT Partner Ecosystem is Divirod. Divirod’s teams work hard to revolutionize access to water data; smarter systems for monitoring water, advanced early flood alerts, and so on. So, this SAS (News - Alert)-Divirod partnership “harnesses the flow of data in the Divirod water network and applies SAS AI and IoT analytics to transform it into better, faster decisions,” explained Jason Mann, Vice President of IoT at SAS.

• New Soracom Flux + Query Intelligence Services: IoT connectivity solutions provider Soracom has announced two new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-centric services designed to accelerate the deployment of larger and more complex IoT projects (i.e. by embedding GenAI deep in the IoT connectivity stack). In short, Soracom Flux is a low-code IoT application builder that eases users into simpler custom application creation; specifically, apps that automate operations via integrations with leading cloud-based GenAI engines, including OpenAI, Google (News - Alert) Gemini, Microsoft Azure AI and Amazon Bedrock. Soracom Query Intelligence, on the other hand, is a managed data warehouse service that allows customers to stream or import device data into a highly available distributed database. For instance, managers of large IoT deployments can use GenAI through this service to query their own IoT network data (again, via natural language prompts) and receive immediate analysis in the form of descriptive texts and data visualizations.

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise Supports Blue Diamond Growers: Blue Diamond is a brand seen in most grocery stores, these days. (At least, that’s my initial thought.) Blue Diamond Growers has a 100-year tradition of providing consumers with quality almond milk and other almond-related products, and now they’ve upped the ante (in terms of wireless networking infrastructure for their 3.3. million square feet of manufacturing facilities and outdoor crop-receiving areas) via Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)’s Aruba Networking Wi-Fi 6E-enabled solution. HPE’s deployment for Blue Diamond Growers “improves mobile and IoT device connectivity to support the processing of approximately a billion pounds of almonds annually,” the announcement detailed. Ryan Funk, IT Infrastructure Director for Blue Diamond Growers, spoke about how the company “has a rich history of leveraging tech innovation to produce and market almond products,” and that HPE Aruba Networking Wi-Fi 6E “is a high-performance tool for us to fulfill our core mission of maximizing grower returns and delivering the benefits of fresh almonds to people around the world.”

• NTT Data’s Ultralight Edge AI Platform: NTT DATA, the IT services arm of NTT that serves thousands of clients by delivering high-value digital transformation solutions (via expert-driven, consultative approaches), recently unveiled its new Ultralight Edge AI platform “to accelerate IT/OT convergence by bringing efficient AI processing to the edge,” the official press release stated. The Edge AI platform (supported by NTT (News - Alert) DATA’s consulting data scientists, managed services and global technical resources) addresses what NTT defines as “shadow IoT challenges and AI infrastructure requirements.” This is made possible by auto-discovering, unifying and processing data from IoT devices and IT assets across the organization, thereby simplifying AI deployment and management.

• 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) for IIoT Customers in Germany: Lastly (until our next ‘TGIF ICYIMI,’ or whatever I actually end up calling these Friday IoT briefs), a quick update from German telecommunications Deutsche Telekom. Last month, the company successfully trialed 5G frequencies in the mmWave range at 26 gigahertz (GHz) for the first time with industrial use cases. (Further context: What’s special about mmWave lies in its ability to transmit large amounts of data in real time.) Other companies involved in this story (linked above) that we’ve written about previously on IoT Evolution and Industrial IoT News include Telit Cinterion and Ericsson. (The full Deutsche Telekom (News - Alert) rundown is linked above.)

For more achievable-by-IoT updates, we encourage visiting our other sites like Industrial IoT News Hub, Smart City Sentinel and GenAI Today. ,